Monday, June 23, 2008

India - India - India

India has been a very interesting place to visit. I am from an indian descent and my mom is from India so I travel frequently to visit my mom's side of the family. It's amazing the life you see in India. The rich are super-rich and the poor are super-poor. There is no in between there. During my recent visit to Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), I stayed at this hotel called The Leela Kempenski and it was very near to the airport. Upon arrival, the door-man knew me by name - now remember, I've never been to that hotel before. I was shocked but more than that, I was delighted and immediately felt warm. They took the trouble to inform every member of their staff on arriving guests and made sure all guests felt just like home.

I was immediately escorted to the signature lounge on the 8th floor where my friend and I were treated to a glass of champagne while we were being checked-in. Our rooms were fantastic. I could stuff about 40 people in the room and still have space to move around. The view from the room was great - pool view and majority of the guests were westerners so the pool view made alot more sense.

Our meeting was 3 days longs and doesnt start till Monday so we decided that we would tour on Sunday. We decided to be typically Malaysian's and tried to act Western - "Let's walk and explore" - that was a bad bad idea. We went towards a direction where civilization was disappearing from our view. But what we saw was rather disturbing. The hotel that we were staying in was a 7star hotel - perks of the job mate. Directly behind it, was slumps. Poor people living. It didn't have proper roofs, proper bathrooms - overall, it wasn't even a house.

We drive around our little expensive cars and sit in air-con rooms, and yet we still complain that we dont have enough. Look at these pics. Don't they move you?

What makes things even worse...there are so many RICH RICH Indians from India who have gone overseas to make a living and are now multi-billionnaires - don't you think they should do something for their country? After all, even if they gave 1% of their total net-worth, it could build an entire condominium for the poor in India and manage it for 15 years. I'm not mentioning names here but you have no idea how rich these guys are - buying over F1's Bernie's home in England for millions of pounds, buying F1 teams just for branding, etc. What is 1% mate? Really?